Alan Hackney

Alan Hackney, who died on May 15 aged 84, wrote some 30 screenplays, countless
television scripts, half a dozen novels – including an international
best-seller – and contributed comic pieces to Punch for several
decades.

6:50PM BST 19 May 2009

But one work overshadows all his others – the film comedy classic I'm All Right Jack, starring Peter Sellers. He was credited as co-writer on the film, but its structure and sharp, witty dialogue sprang fresh from Hackney's second novel on which it was based – Private Life.

Released in 1959, I'm All Right Jack is still shown regularly on television. The film gently satirises the nonsenses of the British class system and the lunacies of labour relations in the years before the Thatcher revolution – of which Hackney totally approved. In the film's main character, Fred Kite, Hackney created one of those comic figures – like Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim or Malcolm Bradbury's History Man – who seem to embody a particular moment in British social history.

In this case the moment was Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's "you've-never-had-it-so-good" era. Comrade Kite, a communist shop steward in a munitions factory, is committed to bringing an end to this bright new age of consumerism and hire purchase, replacing it with the perfect socialist society he envisions Russia to be, with its "miles of cornfields and ballet in the evening".

Kite's co-creator was the actor who played him, Peter Sellers. The role allowed Sellers to make the transition from Goonish comedian to world class character actor. Struggling to build the grotesque bully on the page into a three-dimensional person, he complained to Hackney that there were no jokes in the script to work with.

Grumpily he started to rehearse his lines on the set, with only sparks (electricians) and gaffers (lighting men) for company. When the technicians around him started to laugh out loud, he realised this was, for him, a new kind of script – the kind he would choose to work with for the rest of his film career: not many jokes, but rich with wry comments on human absurdity and strong characterisation.

Alan Charles Langley Hackney was born on September 10 1924 in Manchester. His father, Hubert, was a civil servant and a cup-winning competitive marksman who had learnt his rifle skills as a sniper in the First World War, an experience that had cost him a foot. His mother May (Mary Magdalene) Hackney was the imperious headmistress of a secondary school, with high ambitions for her son.

When the family moved to Chingford, Essex, Alan became a border at a minor Catholic public school in Lancashire. In 1943 he moved to Manchester University, where he studied Economics. But after a year his studies were interrupted by his Army call-up, and he spent a year at Maidstone barracks, where the public school boy encountered "a group of louche characters from all walks of life".

Immediately he started to write down what he saw and heard of these chancers, dodgers, duckers, divers and spivs, whose "war" seemed to consist mostly of fiddling, trading and bunking off. He also took pleasure in writing pen portraits of the upper-class twits who were nominally in charge.

At a dance in Maidstone, the tall, dashing 20-year-old met his future wife Peggy Bartlett, who boasted that she had managed to catch a "young author chappie". She enjoyed what she read of his work, and encouraged him to stick at his writing. Hackney's Maidstone year supplied the material for what was to become his first novel, and first film, Private's Progress – in which a young gent has his university career interrupted by call-up towards the end of the war.

While his novel was still in its earliest draft, Hackney was posted to India. What he saw of Peshawar and its environs failed to impress. He was more caught up by the cast of British types who inhabited the military camps where he was to spend the next two years.

One of his comrades-in-arms was a Sergeant (John) LeMesurier, who was apparently a youthful version of the gentleman NCO he would later portray in the series Dad's Army. LeMesurier would also bring his good-natured diffidence to several of Alan Hackney's films.

In 1947, the year he married, Hackney resumed his university studies, this time at New College, Oxford, where he read PPE, and was greatly impressed by his tutor, Isaiah Berlin.

Like most students at Oxford he whiled away many hours in cafés. But he would take a notebook with him and transcribe the conversations he overheard. The most amusing ones he would submit to Punch magazine, which gave him a regular column "Snacks at Jacks".

The relationship with Punch was to last until the 1980s. A fellow contributor, PG Wodehouse, told the editor that young Hackney's column was one of the best reasons to buy the magazine.

But writing for Punch was not a living, especially as the first of his six children started to arrive, so he became a schoolteacher at Chertsey, Surrey, and then a lecturer in English and Current Affairs at the Naval College in Sheerness, Kent.

Out of this period came his first three novels, and his first two films, Private's Progress (1956) and I'm All Right Jack (1959). Both were built around the same set of ne'er-do-wells. In the first they were in uniform and in the second in Civvy Street. His producer, Roy Boulting, kept as many of the cast as he could in common.

The cast of the two films is almost a catalogue of the British character actors of the period: Richard Attenborough, Ian Bannen, Liz Fraser, Kenneth Griffith, Irene Handl, William Hartnell, Raymond Huntley, Sam Kydd, John LeMesurier, Victor Maddern, Dennis Price, Cardew Robinson, Margaret Rutherford, Terry-Thomas, Thorley Walters – and, of course, Peter Sellers.

The one casting decision of which Hackney disapproved was that of the naïve young university chap who wandered through both films with a bewildered expression – someone inspired not by himself, apparently, but by a contemporary. Ian Carmichael was altogether too gormless for Hackney's taste. He had Cary Grant in mind. That, of course, was aiming far too high. The producer-director team of the Boulting Brothers always had their feet on the ground.

But Hackney did hit a certain height when a letter arrived, addressed to "Dear Hackney". Evelyn Waugh wrote to say how much he admired the young author's work, and invited him down to his house in Somerset. There the two men happily shared their rather dyspeptic conservatism.

Hackney's career was never quite to hit that peak again – but he wrote further novels, scripts for Hollywood, Italy and Canada, as well as the domestic film and television markets, into the 1980s. In recent years he had been working with the composer Howard Blake on a musical based on I'm All Right Jack. Some of this work has been lost from sight, but films like Two-Way Stretch (again with Peter Sellers, in 1960) and You Must Be Joking (directed by a Swinging Sixties Michael Winner in 1965) are still enjoyed.

Hackney's contributions to the Robin Hood television and film genre bought him a rambling Edwardian house on a picturesque village green at Bovingdon, Hertfordshire, where he lived with his wife until her death in 1995. He subsequently lived there with the Canadian film producer Daisy de Bellefeuille.